Tended secures £1.15m of investment to boost growth

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After just 19 months of operation, Lincoln-based tech start-up Tended has recently received £1.15 million of funding, made up of £930,000 private equity investment and £221,985 funding from Innovate UK, the UK’s innovation agency.

The equity investment was led significantly by Blackfinch Ventures, with some additional investment from independent angel investors. The company intends to use the funding to grow the team and facilitate further research and development of their intelligent safety solutions.

Founded in August 2017, Tended creates intelligent wearables and safety solutions that can detect accidents and immediately notify the wearer’s emergency contacts with their GPS location, health and activity data.

As well as their consumer product, which is just months away from shipping, the fast-growing company is also working on a much more advanced commercial solution, which will have the ability to detect and also prevent accidents in businesses working in a variety of industries.

They already have a number of renowned global brands signed up to trial the technology as well as leading insurance companies interested in combining the technology into their policies.

Leo Scott Smith, Founder and CEO of Tended, said: “With this funding, we have already doubled our office space and brought on a number of new team members.

“We are very excited to have received this investment to help develop safety solutions that could potentially save lives. It’s great to see Tended growing so quickly and moving into the commercial space to bring products with real safety benefits to businesses.”

Dr Reuben Wilcock, Venture Partner at Blackfinch, said “We were impressed by the passion and drive of the Tended team who have created a compelling wearables platform in a very short timescale.

“We look forward to seeing them deliver their safety solution to some of the world’s biggest companies in the very near future.”

This news comes not long after Tended was named as one of the UK’s most innovative and exciting tech start-ups by Tech Nation last month as well as taking home the CityX award at the Lincolnshire Tech and Innovation awards in 2018 in recognition of the huge potential of the start-up.

Find out more about Leo Scott Smith, who featured as one of our CityX Ones to Watch earlier this year here.